A sampling of the literature on reading objectives shows a weak sense of direction beyond elementary school. After assessing the problem, the Bureau of Language Arts of the Chicago Board of Education selected inference as the focus of high school reading. To develop a taxonomy of inferences, the Chicago committee began inductively, by writing or selecting passages or stories which its members intuited as being increasingly difficult and appropriate for the various years in high school. The texts chosen were progressively more difficult in terms of the inferences required to comprehend them. In subsequent pilot testing, items that proved difficult included inferences involving judgment or emphasis; questions involving discrimination between related motives or characteristics; inferences of part/whole relations; and questions about the climax of the story, about the relation of setting to plot, and about the function of an incident. However, it was believed that as the fiction reading objectives came to be the more consistent focus of teaching, the Chicago schools would see a marked improvement in reading comprehension. Too, inferential reasoning would at least be one of the instructional emphases in Chicago's high school English courses. (HOD)